A Genesis and Genealogy of British Curriculum Studies

Many of us now involved in curriculum studies used the work of Bernstein as our access point. For instance Denis Lawton, Geoff Whitty, Rob Walker and myself were all students of Bernstein’s in the 1950s and 1960s. Our work represents an enormous debt to Bernstein in opening up what I have recently call the "social constructionist" school of curriculum study.

In summarising the fate of curriculum studies, Bernstein has recently argued that:

Curriculum studies as a recontextualised body of knowledge and practice has a close relationship with the state at a time when the state began its move towards explicit control over the contents of the schools.

This process began at the time of the founding of the Schools Council and has now reached the more systematically interventionist stage embodied in the National Curriculum.

Bernstein of course is right to point out that curriculum studies is deeply implicated in the state’s drive to colonise practice and teachers through curriculum prescription and associated appraisal. But this is too total and too final a view. It repeats a continuing penchant for viewing the subject or discipline as a monolith. The paradox is that it is his own work that has stimulated so much of the study of the social construction of knowledge which has challenged this monolith. In this sense a monolithic view would amount to strangling and denying one’s own creation. One area where the mainstream version of curriculum studies has been successfully challenged is the study of school subjects.

Programmes for Studying School Subjects

With the growth of the state systems of education the school subject became the major focus of schooling for increasing numbers of pupils. As a result scholarship began into the origins of school subjects. Foster Watson (1909), a pioneer in this field, was clear that:

Owing to the rapid development of a system of County and Municipal Secondary Schools in England and Wales, at the present time, a special interest is centred on the place and function of the ‘modern’ subjects in the secondary schools.

This rationale anticipates in some manner the later exhortations of sociologists of knowledge for he argued that:

It is high time that the historical facts with regard to the beginnings of the reaching of modern subjects in England were known, and known in connection with the history of the social forces which brought them into the educational curriculum.

In the fifty-year period following 1909 few scholars followed Foster Watson and sought to relate school subjects to the "social forces which brought them into the educational curriculum" in any general way.

In the 1960s however, a new impetus to scholarship on school subjects came from sociologists and specifically from sociologists of knowledge. Writing in 1968, Frank Musgrove exhorted educational researchers to "examine subjects both within the school and the nation at large as social systems sustained by communication networks, material endowments, and ideologies". In the "communication networks" Esland later argued that research should focus in part, on the subject perspective of the teacher.

The knowledge which a teacher thinks ‘fills up’ his subject is held in common with members of a supporting community who collectively approach its paradigms and utility criteria, as they are legitimated in training courses and ‘official’ statements. It would seem that teachers, because of the dispersed nature of their epistemic communities, experience the conceptual precariousness which comes from the lack of significant others who can confirm plausibility. They are, therefore, heavily dependent on journals, and, to a lesser extent, conferences, for their reality confirmation.

He, together with Dale, later developed this focus on teachers within subject communities:

Teachers, as spokesmen for subject communities are involved in an elaborate organization of knowledge. The community has a history, and, through it, a body of respected knowledge. It has rules for recognizing ‘unwelcome’ or ‘spurious’ matter, and ways of avoiding cognitive contamination. It will have a philosophy and a set of authorities, all of which give strong legitimation to the activities which are acceptable to the community. Some members are accredited with the power to make ‘official statements’ — for instance, editors of journals, presidents, chief examiners and inspectors. These are important as ‘significant others’ who provide models to new or wavering members of appropriate belief and conduct.